Psycho-social aspects of thalassaemia a psychodynamic understanding

Abstract

I was recently appointed as counsellor for the UK Thalassaemia Society, based in London. Soon after I was to attend the first UK Thalassaemia Society's National Conference held in Leicester where, along with a genetic counsellor, I was asked to facilitate a two-hour group discussion entitled ‘Psycho-social Aspects of Thalassaemia'. The day made a strong impact on me, and the writing of this article has been an attempt to integrate my feelings and in turn gain a clearer insight into the psycho-social experience of thalassaemia major.     

Developing a Culturally Appropriate Depression Prevention Program: Opportunities and Challenges

This paper describes the experiences of the first author and his colleagues in the development and implementation of a depression prevention program that specifically targets Latina mothers. Building on the earlier papers that highlight the underutilization of mental health services by Latinos in general, this paper will make the case that the situation is particularly concerning with regards to depression. In addition to the fact that depression is a highly prevalent disorder among Latino adults, the potential consequences for children of parents with depression are significant. Thus, the underutilization of formal mental health services by Latinos makes depression a critical public health problem that calls for creative solutions. One possible solution is the careful development and implementation of prevention programs. Depression prevention programs have some advantages over formal mental health treatment in that they can be offered at a relatively low cost, can be packaged in ways that make them less stigmatizing, and if effective, can reduce the incidence of cases that develop into clinical depression.This paper will describe the process of developing a novel depression prevention program, with a particular focus on the attention paid to cultural sensitivity. We describe the complexity inherent in defining cultural sensitivity and illustrate in concrete ways its implementation in the development and evaluation of the prevention program. In addition, we explore some of the challenges that emerge when attempting to balance the creation of a program that is culturally sensitive with the demands of rigorous quantitative evaluation.     

Infant imitation from television using novel touch screen technology

Infants learn less from a televised demonstration than from a live demonstration, the video deficit effect. The present study employs a novel approach, using touch screen technology to examine 15‐month olds' transfer of learning. Infants were randomly assigned either to within‐dimension (2D/2D or 3D/3D) or cross‐dimension (3D/2D or 2D/3D) conditions. For the within‐dimension conditions, an experimenter demonstrated an action by pushing a virtual button on a 2D screen or a real button on a 3D object. Infants were then given the opportunity to imitate using the same screen or object. For the 3D/2D condition, an experimenter demonstrated the action on the 3D object, and infants were given the opportunity to reproduce the action on a 2D touch screen (and vice versa for the 2D/3D condition). Infants produced significantly fewer target actions in the cross‐dimension conditions than in the within‐dimension conditions. These findings have important implications for infants' understanding and learning from 2D images and for their using 2D media as the basis of actions in the real world.